Shia LaBeouf is sharing the details of the tension between him and Alec Baldwin while working together, claiming things got “contentious” and “competitive.”
The actor, 38, opened up about his relationship with Baldwin, 67, during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Thursday May 8, saying it ultimately caused him to lose his job on the 2013 Broadway play Orphans.
LaBeouf recalled that he had initially been rehearsing the role with Al Pacino before The Godfather star dropped out and Baldwin stepped in as a replacement.
“By the time Baldwin got there, it was almost unfair. So he’s dealing with both my fractured little weak ego, right?” LaBeouf explained. “All this hard prep that I’d done for two years, and my desperate need to show him all my prep, or that he would accept me somehow. I was so insecure. Well, that got contentious in the room. Then he got competitive. That’s just what our relationship turned into.”
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LaBeouf added that as well as finding the loss of Pacino from the play difficult, he was also having a tough time in his personal life at that time.
“I’d be off book, he’d be on book, and he didn’t want me to look at him be off book. That makes it hard to play these scenes out or block this thing even. And no fault against him, he had two weeks to come in because Pacino [dropped out],” LaBeouf said.
He added: “I had built the whole thing based on my relationship with Pacino. And that’s gone. So I was kind of heartbroken. When he came in, I’m living in the park and I’m on steroids and I’m not in a good way.”
Us Weekly has reached out to Baldwin’s representatives for comment.
For his part, Baldwin has previously touched on his acrimonious relationship with the Transformers star while working on the play in an essay for Vulture in 2014.
“There was friction between us from the beginning,” Baldwin wrote. “One day he attacked me in front of everyone. He said, ‘You’re slowing me down, and you don’t know your lines. And if you don’t say your lines, I’m just going to keep saying my lines.’ I asked the company to break.”
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Baldwin added: “And I took the stage manager, with [director Daniel] Sullivan, to another room, and I said one of us is going to go. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll go.’ I said, ‘Don’t fire the kid, I’ll quit.’ They said no, no, no, no, and they fired him. And I think he was shocked.”
In his interview with The Hollywood Reporter, LaBeouf said the pair have since patched things up.
“But me and him are good because he’s gone through a lot. I’ve gone through a lot. We’ve both been able to send each other love and make it right before all the madness happened on both sides,” he said. “We made it right. He’s a good guy. He’s just like me. Fear will make you move different. I found it came from having absolutely no spiritual life.”
